Introduction

The Launchpad team runs a continuous beta program, as well as special beta test campaigns.

You can get access to the beta program by joining the Launchpad beta testers team. There are close to 2,000 beta testers and we encourage enthusiastic users to join that team to get the very latest functionality in Launchpad.

Continuous beta testing

Launchpad deploys new features in a limited fashion by only showing them to members of the beta testers team. For members of the team, no special actions are needed - the new features are immediately available.

Test environments

There is are two test environments, staging.launchpad.net and qastaging.launchpad.net which contain a copy of the Launchpad data and newer code. The staging server additionally has any database changes which we are testing out on in. The databases for these test environments are reset approximately weekly. staging or qastaging are useful if you want to experiment with a feature or to try to reproduce a bug without messing up real data.

Special beta campaigns

We also run regular special beta campaigns where we ask our beta testers to try a specific feature that is in beta, and give us feedback, before we make that feature available to the wider user base. We aim to have one feature in special beta testing in each of our monthly release cycles.